MS- There is some data cherry-picking going on in your argument. If you want to claim that municipalities are laying off teachers because of a reduction in federal income tax rates, the appropriate statistic wouldn't be head-count, so much as total personnel outlay, or even reductions in money flowing from federal to state to local governments. I point this out because I think municipalities are laying off staff due to uncontrolled growth in compensation costs per head, not because rich people pay less in federal income tax.

It's a reasonable argument that the federal government should use rich people's money collected at the federal level to finance uninterrupted irresponsible compensation and benefit policies at the local level, but that's a long ways from saying Jimmy has to be in a class of forty with a tenured babysitter because of the Bush Tax Cuts.

Yes, if we want to discuss the layoffs in the public sector, then unfunded pension liabilities come into play, and if they do, I'm not sure there IS a high enough tax rate. A bipartisan report just estimated that states and municipalities have promised about 1 trillion, much of which they haven't saved for:

Add that to our already 15 or 16 trillion in federal debt, and then add in the cost of social security and Medicare.... and taxes will almost certainly have to be raised, but major reform will also probably be forced and some government services will have to be cut to the bone.

Sadly, I fully expect that politicians will instead inflate their way out of it, because that way no one has to take credit for inflicting pain on the rich or the old or whatever government programs/departments we end up cutting.

All these arguments are incredibly sterile. We have a very large national debt and a large fiscal deficit. It has to be paid down over time. Who pays? The people without money or the people with money? Who pays? The people who don't need social services to get medical care or food or the people who can't afford to see a doctor and who live from week to week just getting by? Who pays? That's the only relevant question.

Until the Democrats get together and actually fix runaway health costs in their pet programs, there's nothing much to be discussed; no one is going to consent to runaway tax increases or runaway debt forever. But for that to happen, of course, numbers would have to come first and idealism second, which I have yet to see reliably happen in that party.

The AHA has mostly not gone into effect yet. So where you see it as "rather successful" is a mystery to me. In any case a redistributive do-si-do like this that aims to get the uninsured insured does little to deal with health care costs. Only things like ending fee-for-service, not stretching elderly people to the absolute limit of their lives, and making it harder to sue will do that.

There were also some things like barring insurance companies from refusing to insure people that always enjoyed widespread support, even among Republicans.

How is 3% a runaway tax increase? That kind of illogic makes rational discussion impossible.

Fact is that taxes will need to go up. There is no other way to pay off the debt and the deficit. None.

Take the Ryan Plan. It doesn't balance the budget for 20 years. It just says that marginal rates will be cut and that somehow revenues will be kept essentially the same as they've been. Romney takes that makes it more explicitly opaque: he'll raise revenue by closing loopholes so the tax burden across the income spectrum will remain the same. That's literally impossible. There are no loopholes that only affect the top 1% or top 2%, which means taxes will go up on all those people who make $250k (in taxable not gross income) but not on the richest AND that taxes will go up for everyone else. That's where the "loopholes" are.

The alternative is that they just cut taxes. Some people still manage to believe that lower taxes will somehow spur so much growth that we'll come out fine fiscally. Put aside that remote chance. Per the CBO, the Tax Foundation and essentially all other analyses, the Romney / Ryan tax cuts would require over $500B to be cut in the 1st year. That's more than the cost of the entire federal government outside of defense. That won't happen so the alternative is a massive increase in the deficit and the debt. So that's where we're heading: a doubling down on the idea that lower taxes are always good with the result that the debt and deficit will mushroom with the result that taxes will then need to go up or the dollar will collapse and we'll then actually be living in a Greek-like nightmare.

I said "runaway taxes _or_ runaway debt." We've currently been choosing the latter, but at least one of them is inevitable if this isn't fixed.

I have a problem not with taxes going up, but with the likely use of the money. When taxes go up, most of the time the Left tries to use it to fund its redistribution habit. Of course, the Right has gotten itself into bad spending habits, too, and will try to spend it on prisons or wars. Either way, no one will try to balance the budget or, should there be a surplus, pay down debt.

Two words "Tort Reform." This is the only serious solution to healthcare costs beyond less regulation for healthcare companies. The only way AHA lowers costs is by forcing healthy individuals to buy insurance they don't need, thus lowering the risk of the pool and allowing providers to charge less. Basically, they are taxing the healthy for the benefit of the unhealthy. Disgusting.

The problem with this argument is that it assumes that if the rich paid higher taxes, the revenue collected would be used for the benefit of the poor. However, a review of recent history suggests that if the government had more money, it would use it to put poor people in prison and on deployment in Middle Eastern wars, while ensuring that investment bankers never saw their bonuses decline.

The prison population and Middle Eastern wars occurred when Republicans realized that Americans weren't punishing Democrats for massive spending programs like Medicare and Medicaid that benefitted their (Democrats') base. So the Republicans started doing it too in ways that benefitted their base.

The other problem with this argument is that if the rich paid higher taxes, the money wouldn't be used to pay down debt. The Left didn't even feel they needed the prospect of more money coming in by higher taxes to enact a new massive government program in health care. Where does all this leave someone who still genuinely believes in less spending across the board, military and otherwise? I don't know, but not with the Democrats.

First, the wars on terror and drugs have not exactly failed to enjoy Democratic support. Other than opposition to Iraq II, the Democrats have readily gone along with these programs.

Second, new taxes wouldn't pay down the debt, because the proposed new taxes wouldn't even be sufficient to close the deficit. Neither party is interested in cutting spending because it goes over so poorly with voters. Where all this leaves a person who genuinely believes in less spending across the board is without a majority of the vote.